Search control in planning for temporally extended goals

Current techniques for reasoning about search control knowledge in AI planning, such as those used in TLPlan, TALPlan- ner, or SHOP2, assume that search control knowledge is conditioned upon and interpreted with respect to a fixed set of goal states. Therefore, these techniques can deal with reachability goals but do not apply to temporally extended goals, such as goals of achieving a condition whenever a certain fact becomes true. Temporally extended goals convey several intermediate reachability goals to be achieved at different point of execution, sometimes with cyclic executions; that is, the notion of goal state becomes dynamic. In this paper, we describe a method for reasoning about search control knowledge in the presence of temporally extended goals. Given such a goal, we generate an equivalent Biichi automaton- An automaton recognising the language of the executions satisfying the goal-and interpret control knowledge over this automaton and the world state trajectories generated by a forward search planner. This method is implemented and experimented with as an extension of the TLPlan planner, which incidentally becomes capable of handling cyclic goals.